Pentagon condemns 'war on Islam' US training class
Gen Martin Dempsey has now ordered a full investigation into the course
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18032968
America's top military officer has condemned a course taught at a US military college that advocated a "total war" against Muslims.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Martin Dempsey, said the course was "totally objectionable" and "against our values".
The voluntary course at the Joint Forces Staff College in Virginia also suggested possible nuclear attacks on holy Muslim cities such as Mecca.
The course has now been suspended.
"It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn't academically sound," Gen Dempsey said.
He added that he had ordered a full investigation when the course was suspended in April after one of the students objected to the material.
The officer in charge of the class, Lt Col Matthew Dooley, has been suspended from teaching but has kept his job at the college in the city of Norfolk.
The Pentagon has also confirmed that the course material found on their website is authentic.
'Barbaric ideology'
The story broke after a copy of the presentation of the course material was posted online by Wired.com's Danger Room blog.
"We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as 'moderate Islam'," Lt Col Dooley said in the presentation last July.
"It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction."
He added that international laws protecting civilians in armed conflicts - such as the Geneva Conventions were "no longer relevant".
That left open the option, the instructor continued, of applying "the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki" to Islam's holiest cities, and bringing about "Mecca and Medina destruction".
Lt Col Dooley has made no public comments on the issue since the story broke.
The Pentagon hopes a full report will be out by the end of the month, the BBC's North America editor Mark Mardell reports.
What does seem rather surprising, he adds, is that all those commanders, captains and colonels must have sat through the course and not felt the need to tell someone that something rather weird was going on.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18032968

Like so many children Yannis Coviaux loved the beach, playing in the sand and the sea. His father’s solitary consolation this weekend is that his four-year-old boy died happy, clutching a toy car and contented after a blissful day with friends. Yannis was among the victims mown down by a 19-tonne refrigerated truck driven by a mass murderer.

His tale is just one of the heartbreaking stories from the Bastille Day massacre in Nice. Father Mickael Coviaux told a French paper how he pulled his wife out of the way and dived to the ground as the lorry, driven with such lethal intent, bore down on them. Then he looked up and saw his son lying still in a pool of blood. ‘When I saw him on the floor, I immediately understood,’ he said. ‘It looked like Aylan.’

“Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drank, smoke, gambled and took drugs. He ate pork, enjoyed music and, although a married father of three, eyed up his neighbour’s daughters”

Two tiny boys. Two tiny corpses. And one apparent link in that they were both victims of jihadist terrorism in their own separate ways. Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Kurd from northern Syria who fled the savagery of Islamic State only to drown in the Mediterranean amid hostility to such refugees. And Yannis Coviaux, a four-year-old French boy who died after a day spent playing innocently in the surf of the same sea.

Yannis was far from the only child to die last week in Nice. Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel also killed another four-year-old named Kylian Mejri, along with his mother Olfa Ben Souayah Khalfallah; like Bouhlel, she lived in France but was of Tunisian descent. These atrocities do not discriminate between religions or nationalities, of course, since their sole purpose is to sow the utmost havoc, horror and hatred.

Muslim fanaticism not the root cause

But we should pause to ponder whether politicians and the media are playing a part in furthering their divisive cause. The Nice killings were instantly blamed on Islamic State, fuelling fears over Muslim fanaticism. Sure enough, the terror group soon claimed Bouhlel was one of their ‘soldiers’. With the now familiar choreography of such attacks, French politicians condemned IS depravity while opponents – particularly the far-right – sought to make maximum political capital from bloodshed.

Public concerns are understandable; this was the third major attack on French soil in 18 months. Yes, we know burgers, cars and smoking wipe out far more people in the West than terrorist bombs, guns and knives. That fewer people died in recent years from terrorism than in previous decades. And that such evil slaughter is the most ignorant perversion of Islam. But cold statistics do not set racing minds at rest.

Yet was Bouhlel really a jihadist killer, dying from twisted devotion to his religion? Or merely a pathetic inadequate who cloaked himself in their cause to carry out deeds no different from those mass shootings we see all too often in America? France’s interior minister claimed Bouhlel ‘radicalised himself very quickly.’ And there is no doubt IS seeks to encourage such killings. Before rushing to judgement and inflating their cruel image, however, consider the facts.

As a boy, Bouhlel was troubled and violent – ‘he would break anything he saw in front of him,’ said his father. The delivery driver had been prescribed medication for depression. He drank, smoke, gambled and took drugs. He ate pork, enjoyed music and, although a married father of three, eyed up his neighbour’s daughters. He was a loner, estranged from his wife and probably suffering financial problems. He was known to police for theft and domestic violence, but not for links to religious extremism.

Bouhlel’s family said he did not pray or attend a mosque. His wife’s cousin said ‘he was not a Muslim, he was a *… a nasty piece of work.’ Perhaps in the depths of despair he found solace suddenly in religion and fell in with hardliners. Possibly he was turned rapidly by the bloodstained bigots of Isis into a jihadist killer. But even if confirmed, the evidence still points to a sick individual filled with loathing, whose personal troubles exploded in the most terrible way on the wider world.

Similarity to Orlando killings

In this, he was no different to Omar Mateen, another disturbed man who last month killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Florida. Once again, he left little trail of links to religious extremists although had watched gruesome Isis videos; his only radical messages posted online came the night he carried out barbarity. He had even been followed by the FBI for months. But he beat up classmates, was a long-term steroid user and, although twice married, seems to have struggled with his sexuality.

How often do we hear these mass killers took drugs, stole and were violent before seeking infamy? And how rare the evidence they observed tenets of the religion in whose name they kill. Yet the consequences of their carnage is clear – just look at the latest Pew survey showing a rise in unfavourable views of Muslims across Europe. The proportion of British people holding such views has risen from 19 to 28 per cent since last year; in several nations from Spain to Hungary, it is far higher.

Muslims have become the target of prejudice in the way Jews were once persecuted, a minister declared yesterday.

Shahid Malik, an international development minister, said he did not intend any comparison with the Nazi Holocaust.

But he added: 'In the way that it was and still is in some parts, almost legitimate to target Jews, many Muslims would say we feel the exact same way - that somehow there is a message out there that it is OK to target people as long as they are Muslims.'

The complaint by the Dewsbury MP will carry added weight because Mr Malik is regarded as one of the most measured of Muslim leaders, regularly attacking Islamist extremism and suggesting that those who want to live under sharia law could emigrate to do it.

But he added that many feel it legitimate to pick on Muslims 'and you don't have to worry about the facts... people will turn a blind eye.'

The Burnley-born MP, interviewed for Channel 4's Dispatches programme by Mail writer Peter Oborne, told how his car has been firebombed in a petrol station and he receives regular hate mail.

He said: 'I have been the victim of Islamophobia and hatred on many occasions. My family car from years ago was firebombed. Somebody did a hit-and-run while I was walking in a petrol station some years ago.

'They saw me, they went for me, they caught my leg. I, fortunately, was not seriously injured but the CCTV wasn't working and so we were not able to apprehend individuals.'

Exaggerated stories about high-handed behaviour by Muslims are having a damaging effect and hampering the fight against extremism, added 40-year-old Mr Malik.

He cited a newspaper account which said a hospital had been told to turn beds with Muslim patients towards Mecca five times a day and dying Muslims might be asked if they wished to face Mecca.

'That makes Muslims feel like aliens in their own country and, at a time when we want to engage with Muslims, actually the opposite happens,' he added.

'They start to become much more insular than we need them to be. It is having a really negative impact on communication, on the whole agenda to tackle extremism.'

Mr Malik said that 'vile' people such as July 7 bomber Muhammad Siddique Khan were abhorrent to all Muslims. 'But it seems very difficult for some people to desegregate people who are evil, who have no religion.'

The minister's view won support from an opinion poll carried out for the programme.

The survey of 1,006 people by ICM Omnibus found 70 per cent believe there is more prejudice against Muslims since the July 2005 bombings and that 52 per cent think Muslims face unjustified criticism.

Of 500 Muslims polled in a parallel survey, 55 per cent said they play a valuable role in society and 13 per cent thought Islamic and British values are not compatible.

RELIGIOUS RE-EDUCATION
Since ethnic riots in the regional capital Urumqi in 2009, Xinjiang has been plagued by bouts of deadly violence.
The incidence of attacks reported in state media have actually declined markedly, both in frequency and scale, since a spate of bombings and mass stabbings in Xinjiang and southwestern Yunnan Province in 2014.
But Chinese state media say the threat remains high and the Communist Party has vowed to continue what it terms its own "war on terror" against spreading Islamist extremism.
In Xinjiang, this can also be seen at weekly flag-raising ceremonies that Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people who formed the majority in Xinjiang before an influx of Han Chinese, are required to attend to denounce religious extremism and pledge fealty under the Chinese flag.
At one such event witnessed by Reuters in Hotan, a former Silk Road oasis town 500 km (300 miles) southeast of Kashgar, more than 1,000 people filed onto an open-air basketball court where Party officials checked their names against an attendance list and inspected their dress and appearance.
"Best you take this off or I'll send you to re-education," said one female official, pulling back the black hijab worn by a middle-aged Uighur woman to expose her forehead and hair.
Hotan authorities offer 2,000 yuan ($290) rewards for those who report "face coverings and robes, youth with long beards, or other popular religious customs that have been radicalized", as part of a wider incentive system that rewards actionable intelligence on imminent attacks.
Xinjiang lawmakers this week approved legislation extending a prohibition on "abnormal" beards and the wearing of veils in public places across the whole region. The new rules come into force on Saturday.
This month a video purportedly released by the Islamic State group showed Uighur fighters training in Iraq and vowing that blood would "flow in rivers" in China....

A police officer checks the identity card of a man as security forces keep watch in a street in Kashgar, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China, March 24, 2017. REUTERS/Thomas Peter

By Philip Wen | KASHGAR/HOTAN, China

Three times a day, alarms ring out through the streets of China's ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, and shopkeepers rush out of their stores swinging government-issued wooden clubs.

In mandatory anti-terror drills conducted under police supervision and witnessed by Reuters on a recent visit, they fight off imaginary knife-wielding assailants. Armored paramilitary and police vehicles circle with sirens blaring.

China says it faces a serious threat from Islamist extremists in this far Western Xinjiang region. Beijing accuses separatists among the Muslim Uighur ethnic minority there of stirring up tensions with the ethnic Han Chinese majority and plotting attacks elsewhere in China.

A historic trading post, Kashgar is also central to China's One Belt, One Road (OBOR) Initiative, President Xi Jinping's signature foreign and economic policy involving massive infrastructure spending linking China to Asia, the Middle East and beyond.

China's worst fears are that a large-scale attack would blight this year's diplomatic setpiece, an OBOR summit attended by world leaders planned for Beijing in May.

State media say the drills, and other measures such as a network of thousands of new street-corner police posts, are aimed making everyone feel safer.

But many residents say the drills are just part of an oppressive security operation that has been ramped up in Kashgar and other cities in Xinjiang's Uighur heartland in recent months. (For a graphic on China's Xinjiang crackdown click tmsnrt.rs/2nQrQm4)

As well as taking part in drills, shopkeepers must, at their own expense, install password-activated security doors, "panic buttons" and cameras that film not just the street outside but also inside their stores, sending a direct video feed to police.

For Uighurs like the owner of an online multimedia company facing one of Kashgar's main streets it is not about security, but mass surveillance.

"We have no privacy," said the business owner who, like almost everyone Reuters spoke to in Kashgar, did not want to give his name. "They want to see what you're up to."

A Chinese security source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the new security measures in Xinjiang were not politically motivated, but based on fresh developments and intelligence. He declined to elaborate.

The Xinjiang government and the State Council Information Office, which doubles as the Communist Party spokesman's office, did not respond to requests for comment.

China routinely denies pursuing repressive policies in Xinjiang, and points to the vast sums it spends on economic development in the resource-rich region. Xinjiang's gross domestic product last year rose 7.6 per cent, above the national average.

RELIGIOUS RE-EDUCATION

Since ethnic riots in the regional capital Urumqi in 2009, Xinjiang has been plagued by bouts of deadly violence.

The incidence of attacks reported in state media have actually declined markedly, both in frequency and scale, since a spate of bombings and mass stabbings in Xinjiang and southwestern Yunnan Province in 2014.

But Chinese state media say the threat remains high and the Communist Party has vowed to continue what it terms its own "war on terror" against spreading Islamist extremism.

In Xinjiang, this can also be seen at weekly flag-raising ceremonies that Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people who formed the majority in Xinjiang before an influx of Han Chinese, are required to attend to denounce religious extremism and pledge fealty under the Chinese flag.

At one such event witnessed by Reuters in Hotan, a former Silk Road oasis town 500 km (300 miles) southeast of Kashgar, more than 1,000 people filed onto an open-air basketball court where Party officials checked their names against an attendance list and inspected their dress and appearance.

"Best you take this off or I'll send you to re-education," said one female official, pulling back the black hijab worn by a middle-aged Uighur woman to expose her forehead and hair.

Hotan authorities offer 2,000 yuan ($290) rewards for those who report "face coverings and robes, youth with long beards, or other popular religious customs that have been radicalized", as part of a wider incentive system that rewards actionable intelligence on imminent attacks.

Xinjiang lawmakers this week approved legislation extending a prohibition on "abnormal" beards and the wearing of veils in public places across the whole region. The new rules come into force on Saturday.

This month a video purportedly released by the Islamic State group showed Uighur fighters training in Iraq and vowing that blood would "flow in rivers" in China.

"GRID-STYLE" SURVEILLANCE

The architect of the anti-terror drills and other new measures in Xinjiang is Chen Quanguo, appointed Communist Party boss in the region in August in what analysts said was an implicit endorsement of his hard-line management of ethnic strife in neighboring Tibet.

Chen has made his mark swiftly, culminating last month in what state media described as mass "anti-terror" rallies across Xinjiang's four largest cities involving tens of thousands of paramilitary troops and police.

One of Chen's most visible initiatives has been to build thousands of what the authorities call "convenience police stations" across Xinjiang and hire some 30,000 new officers to man them.

They are present on almost every intersection in Kashgar, typically just hundreds of meters apart, in what Chen calls a "grid-style social management" system he pioneered in Tibet.

Local state media have praised the initiative as a new benchmark in community-based policing. Critics, including Uighur and rights groups, say the real purpose of the convenience police stations is to spy on the population.

Citizens are encouraged to use the stations to charge their mobile phones, have a cup of tea or shelter from the elements.

"I don't know anyone who has been in there," said one Han Chinese taxi driver, who only wanted to be identified by his surname Huang, suggesting few have taken up on the offer to huddle beside the riot police and soldiers that occupy the stations.

But Huang, reflecting the region's simmering ethnic tensions, added that the increased security made him feel safer.

"Some people think it's too much, that it's just a few Uighurs," he said. "But if they chop your family, then you'll know."

ECONOMY OR SECURITY?

James Leibold, an expert on Chinese ethnic policy at La Trobe University in Melbourne, said the focus on security runs counter to Beijing's goal of using the OBOR initiative to boost Xinjiang's economy and improve its integration with the rest of China, because it would disrupt the flow of people and ideas.

"Those two are just fundamentally at odds," he said.

Spending on security in Xinjiang is rising, jumping nearly 20 percent in 2016 to more than 30 billion yuan ($4.35 billion), according to state media.

That can be seen in the metal detectors and airport-style security checks in place at major public areas, including Kashgar's ancient Id Kah mosque, bazaars, malls and hotels.

Police spot document checks are carried out on pedestrians, with mobile phones inspected for extremist videos or use of banned chat applications like Telegram, WhatsApp and Twitter. Mobile internet speeds have been slowed from 4G to 3G.

"There's maybe 5,000 people making trouble, but the rest of us, 10 million of us, pay the price," one Uighur man in Kashgar told Reuters.

Reuters was tailed closely by local police in Kashgar. A reporter returning to his hotel at 1 a.m. found officers waiting in the lobby.

When asked about the reason for the security one of the officers said Kashgar's preparations for OBOR were of paramount importance.

"When you see military and police vehicles patrolling the street in your country, what do you think it's for?" he said. "It's for safety. Kashgar will be a hub for travel. Everything must be good."

The Independent Online
Mr Malik said that many British Muslims now felt like 'aliens in their own country' Reuters
Britain's first Muslim minister has attacked the growing culture of hostility against Muslims in the United Kingdom, saying that many feel targeted like "the Jews of Europe".

Shahid Malik, who was appointed as a minister in the Department for International Development (Dfid) by Gordon Brown last summer, said it has become legitimate to target Muslims in the media and society at large in a way that would be unacceptable for any other minority.

Mr Malik made clear that he was not equating the situation with the Holocaust but warned that many British Muslims now felt like "aliens in their own country". He said he himself had been the target of a string of racist incidents, including the firebombing of his family car and an attempt to run him down at a petrol station.

"I think most people would agree that if you ask Muslims today what do they feel like, they feel like the Jews of Europe," he said. "I don't mean to equate that with the Holocaust but in the way that it was legitimate almost – and still is in some parts – to target Jews, many Muslims would say that we feel the exact same way.

"Somehow there's a message out there that it's OK to target people as long as it's Muslims. And you don't have to worry about the facts, and people will turn a blind eye."

A poll to accompany the documentary highlights the growing polarisation of opinion among Britain's 1.6 million Muslims, who say they have suffered a marked increase in hostility since the London bombings.

The ICM survey found that 51 per cent of Britons blame Islam to some degree for the 2005 attacks while more than a quarter of Muslims now believe Islamic values are not compatible with British values. While 90 per cent of Muslims said they felt attached to Britain, eight out of 10 said they felt there was more religious prejudice against their faith since the July bombings.

The Dispatches film, "It Shouldn't Happen to a Muslim", presented by the writer and broadcaster Peter Oborne, examines claims that negative attitudes to Muslims have become legitimised by think-tanks and newspaper commentators, who use language that is now being parroted by the far right.

Mr Malik, who narrowly escaped serious injury when a car was driven at him at a petrol station in his home town of Burnley in 2002, said he regularly receives anti-Muslim hate mail at his constituency office in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, which has the highest BNP vote in the country and was home to Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the suicide attackers who killed 52 people in London in 2005.

The MP said the negative portrayal of Muslims in the media, including a story run by several national newspapers in December last year wrongly stating that staff in the Dewsbury and District Hospital had been ordered to turn the beds of Muslim patients towards Mecca five times a day, was a key example of how his co-religionists were being alienated from the mainstream.

He said: "It's almost as if you don't have to check your facts when it comes to certain people, and you can just run with those stories. It makes Muslims feel like aliens in their own country. At a time when we want to engage with Muslims, actually the opposite happens."

The Dispatches programme also speaks to Andy Hayman, the former Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner who was Britain's most senior anti-terrorism officer until he resigned last December. Mr Hayman, who was criticised for failing to tell senior Scotland Yard officers that an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, had been shot dead after being mistaken for a suicide bomber, is asked why he thinks it is important to engage with Muslims expressing extreme views.

Mr Hayman said: "Because we're tackling head on the people that we feel are at the heartbeat of this whole complex agenda. Not to have a dialogue with them would seem that we are apprehensive, we're scared, we're frightened... So even if it's appeasement in some quarters, that is still a conversation that is not being had and needs to be had."

Mr Malik's comments were backed by Simon Woolley, a member of the Government's task force on race equality, and co-founder of Operation Black Vote. He said: "On an almost daily basis, there is rampant Islamophobia in this country, the effect of which is not for our Muslim community to get closer to a sense of Britishness but to feel further away from a feeling of belonging in British society."_________________--
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
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Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."

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